The Past
by CrystalMaiden77
Summary: This shows more of what Anti-Tails' past was like, from his orphanage burning down to him getting right where he was when Scourge found him. You should read The Kidnapping too because technically it takes place around the time of this.


Born somewhere on Anti-Mobius, Miles Prower, the two-tailed fox known as Anti-Tails several years later, was brought to Coconut Island as a day-old infant and abandoned there by prestigious parents disgusted by his second tail. There, Miles lived in its orphanage, barely kept alive, neglected for most of every day, made fun of by the other orphans at recess and brought to them for that purpose. He wasn't allowed to have toys, his tails and face were beaten with a ruler on a daily basis, and was only educated reluctantly.

Full of shame and disgust with himself for his second tail, Miles spent most of every day miserable, with the only positives to his situation being that he was still being provided with the things essential for him to live. This wasn't something he learned to appreciate until one fateful day when he had just turned 4.

A group of orphans about his age had just finished their usual bullying of him for recess. They had insulted him until he broke down crying in the process. Satisfied with themselves and seeing Miles as pathetic, they laughed at him in the recess field before dinner with clear malice and lack of respect in their eyes, the tallest one among them having knocked him to the ground with a punch in the face. Having no compassion for the feelings of someone who was so different from them, they ran into the orphanage as the recess bell rang, and one of them stayed behind instead of following the others to the kitchen, saying, " Good night! " mockingly.

Miles gasped at hearing that as he tried to push himself up off the ground, because he knew from experience exactly what that meant. The double doors slammed shut as he stood up, and before he could even start running towards them in a panic, he heard the familiar sound of a broom being put sideways between the doors and their one handle, making it impossible to open. Miles shouted, " No! " as he rushed up to the doors and desperately tried to open the door multiple times to no avail, as the broom on the other side made it impossible.

After a while of banging on the door, he realized he was being ignored by the people in the building, and gave up, sitting in front of the door with tears in his eyes. Anger started to build up in him as he remembered the last few times that happened and the sheer injustice of how everyone who did that to him got away with it. Clenching his fists to try to express his rage and feel more in control, there was nothing he desired more than for the apathetic staff and hateful orphans to get a punishment for once, and he didn't care what it would be.

Suddenly, there was an explosion on the roof of the orphanage as lightning struck it with an earth-shaking boom, and as Miles heard the unnerving screams of the people in the building, he saw fires through the windows trapping everyone there. Miles watched paralyzed with fear as fires escaped the building through the windows and the smell of smoke escaped from it as it filled the orphanage. The only home he had ever known was going down in flames, and it had all happened in an instant.

Terrified, he impulsively ran away from the flaming building in a panic, climbed the fence surrounding the recess field, and ran into the woods, instinctively spinning his tails behind him in a circle creating wind that propelled him further ahead, so that his tails were doing far more to move him ahead than his actual running. Moving faster than he had ever before, and too panicked to realize it, the two-tailed fox fled the scene for dear life, having no clear idea of where to go next or what he would do when he got there.

After running through the woods for several minutes in a blind panic, he finally stopped, from a combination of exhaustion and no longer being able to smell the smoke and fire. Sitting in front of some bushes with trees and shrubs surrounding him, he looked up at the leaves dimming the evening sunlight above him, turned around to look back at the way he had come from, and after his stomach growled reminding him of his hunger, it finally began to dawn on him that the place he called his home was gone, and his life would be changed forever. In a stunned shock, he felt light-headed from overwhelming fear and despair, as he started thinking about everything he had just lost, and why he might never get it back.

He had lost his home. As miserable as he was there, at least he was still provided with food, as well as a warm place to stay and to sleep at night, and drinkable water, even if the workers there hated him, and only kept him alive to make money off him. He never knew what he had until it was gone.

Now that his orphanage was burned to the ground, along with all of the people he interacted with in his life – aside from potential parents who rejected him on sight – who would ever take him in? Who would let a freak of nature live with them? Even if they rebuilt the orphanage, they wouldn't let him come to the next one, and with his luck, he'd probably be blamed for the fire. In fact, he certainly would be, considering that he was always used as a scapegoat by the orphans who bullied him and the workers who took all of their stresses out on him.

He was the only one who survived. He was outside when the orphanage was set on fire, and on top of all that, everyone in the orphanage already blamed him for the spike in thunderstorms that had only hit the island when he was brought there for the first time, so him being blamed for the lightning strike was a certainty. Even more fear began to overwhelm him as he started shaking uncontrollably, his pupils already shrunken in fear as he began to hug his knees close to his chest to comfort himself, horrified at the prospect that for the rest of his life, the people of the island would regard him as a murderer.

If it were only the people who lived or worked in his orphanage that would discriminate against him and blame him for bad weather, then he wouldn't have been treated in the exact same way by every potential parent he got to see, including the potential parents who came from outside of the island. It wasn't just the people of the orphanage who were unfair to him. It was the world.

The people of the island in general knew the workers of the orphanage. The workers must have told the other islanders their opinions of him, and that would get spread around the island from other people communicating in a vast social network of islanders. Word would spread of the workers' absence by the next day at latest; at least the orphanage wasn't next to any other buildings, so no other, completely innocent buildings could get set ablaze, and have immediate witnesses next to the orphanage right away to spread the word. But that was cold comfort. In the end, all that mattered was that everyone on the island would be furious with him at worst, afraid of him at best, and either way, would refuse to actually help him.

Miles' stomach grumbled again, reminding him of how he needed dinner that he would have a much harder time finding from now on, and he became distracted by his panicked train of thought and the guilt that he couldn't help getting. All he could focus on was that he needed to eat, and a look of determination and frustration appeared on his face as he tried to look brave and stood up, thinking, " _I'm gonna get something to eat whether people like it or not!_ " He forced himself to start running through the woods some more in spite of his exhaustion, having no conscious awareness of the fact that he was running significantly slower than last time, back to running at the normal speed that he expected himself to be restricted to.

Running through the woods dodging trees along the way, Miles had no idea where he was going, having no concept of where things were on the island, and could only hope he was heading for buildings with food and water in them. Fortunately, he would turn out to be right, heading for the exact center of the island, but much to his chagrin, there were people inside of every single one of them.

He could see those people through the windows of each house, and what was worse was that the people in those homes were having dinner right in front of him. He felt like he was being cheated out of it, but his frustration and resentment were overshadowed by his fear. He knew that if he went into any house while people were inside one, he would only draw their attention to him, and three things would happen; he'd be insulted, beaten if anyone ever got close to him, and word would spread of his location on the island from witnesses spotting him there, which would force him to start running until he'd find a far enough place on it to hide.

With tears running down his face, Miles hoped no one would see him as he hid behind some bushes in the middle of a thunderstorm, impatiently waiting for the people in the house to go to bed, crying and sniffling until it finally happened. The lights in the house went out after everyone in the kitchen left it and became hidden behind the curtains draped in front of the windows of what Miles presumed were the bathroom and bedrooms, where people would possibly want privacy the most.

Of course, he could only presume this, because he had no idea what a normal home life was even like. He was never allowed to watch television before, the only way he'd be able to find out about what a normal life was actually like, so with no real exposure to the world outside of the orphanage, he was left guessing on a lot of things. He was left focusing on every detail he could find to figure out what it all added up to, and forming surprisingly intelligent plans for someone so young and isolated, thinking deeply about what to do next for his own survival. He was far too insecure to realize it, but he was taking advantage of his own genius for the first ever time.

When it was finally dark enough at night that he was able to make himself take the risk, Miles slowly walked up to the back door of the house, trying to be as silent as possible. The door didn't look like any kind of door he'd ever seen before. It didn't have a doorknob on it. Instead, it had a rectangular hole in it that seemed to expect him to put his fingers in it, and after pulling it towards him and pushing it away from him in futility, Miles stubbornly started to push the door to the left in desperation, and to his surprise and relief, it worked. It actually pushed to the left, and upon being faced with a second door after it that he could see through the transparent window of the first door, he tried the same thing and it worked.

The only problem he had was that pushing the doors made a loud sound, or at least loud to him, causing him to push them very slowly in a series of cautious pushes until finally, each door was open enough for him to turn to the side and squeeze himself into the house past them.

Not understanding why he'd have to close the doors, he sighed in relief, and sat down for a while in the dining room letting his eyes slowly adjust to the darkness, terrified of making any more noise by walking into or onto anything he was completely unable to see. As he was waiting, he started to get tired of the cold wind coming in from outside behind him, and with that, he decided he might as well close the doors if he was going to be staying still for that long, and started the slow process of carefully closing each door in a long series of very short pushes. He started with the door furthest from him because he wouldn't be able to interact with it after closing the door in front of it. Throughout the entire experience, he was a nervous wreck, terrified of alerting the people in the house to his presence with the sounds he was making, and just wanted all of it to end.

It had never occurred to him that any doors to a person's house would be locked. He had never even heard of such a concept. He simply assumed that everyone on the island would keep their doors unlocked for the sake of their own convenience.

When Miles was finally able to see in the dark and had the courage to make himself walk around some more, he slowly stood up and walked towards the kitchen very carefully, cringing at hearing the wood floor of the dining room creak under his feet and sighing in relief when his feet hit the kitchen floor tiles and stopped making as much noise. No one had ever taught him how to tip-toe, and he had never seen anyone else do it. He had come up with the idea to make himself quieter that way entirely on his own, and he had no way of knowing if that was something to be proud of or not.

Slowly pulling the handle of the fridge towards him and backing away to open it, he wasn't sure if he should feel proud about what he was doing at the moment, either. He had never been told exactly what stealing was, that it was something the police would prosecute, or even what it was called, but he at least had personal experience with the other orphans stealing his food from him, and the workers in the orphanage withholding food from him out of spite. In fact, that was the entire reason he had missed out on lunch that day.

Was that how he was going to be making the inhabitants of that house feel? He felt like a hypocrite, and a bully, because the people of the house had done nothing to him to deserve it yet, but as his stomach growled once again, he pressed on, not wanting to start feeling even more weak from hunger and scared of the growling of his stomach alerting people to his presence.

Staring at the contents of the fridge, squinting at the bright light that lit up the inside of the fridge when he had spent so much time adjusting his eyes to the darkness, he wondered how he could prepare a meal for himself. He had no experience with cooking. He had never even seen anyone do it. He could imagine himself making a sandwich, that seemed like a very simple concept, but he wasn't sure if that would be a very filling meal, and if he was going to be in a situation where food scarcity would be normal for him, filling meals would be the thing he'd need to focus on.

He needed to eat healthily if he wanted to survive. He could still remember the orphanage workers lecturing the kids in the orphanage that they couldn't spend too much time eating candy, chocolate and ice cream, because it wasn't good for them. So Miles decided reluctantly to avoid them from that moment on. He had to focus on eating healthy to keep himself alive. So what was the most healthy for him to eat?

He slowly pulled towards him a " drawer " in the fridge that contained various vegetables in it, including tomatoes, broccoli, celery sticks, and cucumbers. Some vegetables would taste better cooked, but he would only be able to find out which ones and how long he'd have to cook them in the microwave through a tedious process of trial and error, heating them up for 10 seconds at a time over and over again to prevent them from being burned and wasted on him. Not to mention having to throw away burned vegetables would leave behind evidence of him being in the person's house. And another problem was that in his experience, microwaves made loud humming noises while they were working, as well as loud beeping sounds as someone pressed the buttons on them, and he couldn't afford making more noise than he already had. Experimenting with a relatively loud microwave was something he was better off only doing in an empty house.

As of the moment, he would be better off settling for food he wouldn't have to cook. So Miles brought a tomato, cucumber and three celery sticks out of the fridge for himself, looking depressed with his ears drooping and his eyes downcast at what he'd have to stick to eating from that moment on. He took a bite out of the cucumber in his right hand, only to find that not only was it hard to bite all the way through, but he made more noise while doing so, and he was startled as a result, and hoped desperately that said noise wouldn't make it upstairs to the bedrooms on the higher floor.

Hoping that the people in the house were too far upstairs to hear him, he placed all the vegetables on the kitchen counter, put the cucumber on it and kept it against it by the left end, and started cutting it into tiny pieces by pressing a kitchen knife against it, progressing from the right side to the left. His anxiety increased more and more as the knife started getting closer to his hand, until he at last lost the courage to continue, and settled for the final cucumber piece being larger than all the rest.

With that, he returned the knife to its original place hoping no one would get suspicious, gathered all of the cucumber slices into his hand, started holding the tomato and celery sticks with his left hand, and slowly tip-toed out of the kitchen trying to move as far away from the stairs as he could. This happened to lead him to a door, which he opened by gripping and turning it with one of his two tails in desperation, and he couldn't help but smile a little to himself at that, finally giving himself credit for something that day.

The door he opened led to stairs down to the basement, the absolute best outcome he could've hoped for; worst case scenario, the door would've led to a person's bedroom, and he would've been screwed. He slowly tip-toed down the stairs closing the door behind him carefully with his tail, wishing the stairs didn't creak as they forced him to walk down them one at a time very cautiously, taking anywhere from several seconds to even a minute between every stair just in case as he quietly fed himself cucumber slices for supper. It felt like it took forever for him to finally reach the basement couch to sit on it, and by that point, he had gotten started on his celery sticks.

He wasn't aware of it at the time, but the main reason the people of the house weren't getting suspicious of the noise he was making by walking around, was that every house had random creaks in it along with other noises in the night, which didn't usually mean someone was walking through the house. As a result, the people in the house deep in sleep merely chalked the floor noises up to that, when they even could hear noises from the floor below them to begin with.

Trying to calm himself down, Miles quietly ate his makeshift supper, alternating between the strong-tasting tomato that overwhelmed him with its taste and the celery sticks that made a loud crunch sound upon biting into them. It wasn't until he finished eating that he began to calm down, and pulled the blankets of the couch over himself, put his head on a pillow, and closed his eyes, trying to relax and adjust to the life he was going to have to live from now on. With that, he silently cried himself to sleep, feeling guilty about what he was forced to resort to.

The next morning, as expected, was a very depressing and anxiety-inducing one. Miles woke up from a guilt-induced nightmare forcing him to relive his most recent traumatic memory, witnessing his orphanage burning down as he stared at it from a distance horrified. The nightmare was made a lot worse by the fact that every potential parent who had rejected him at the orphanage, the only representation of people outside the orphanage he had, were furiously shouting at him for causing the destruction of the building. " Demon! " " Murderer! " " You did this! " Their voices haunted him for the rest of the night, and a lifetime of being made to feel ashamed of himself made him far more likely to be manipulated into agreeing with such an idea on some level, blaming himself for what had happened.

Thinking back to it, the orphanage had been struck by lightning the instant he wanted revenge. He was angry at being locked out again, and frustrated at the people in the orphanage always getting away with how they treated him, and wanted them all to pay for what they did for once. But he never wanted them to pay with their lives. If anything, he would've been much happier if they just changed their behavior, and started treating him just like any other kid. But he knew that would never happen, so there was no point in desiring such an unrealistic goal, compared to wanting them to simply suffer in some way, no matter what that way could be. Maybe it really was his fault.

He woke up in a panic, and became even more panicked at realizing he didn't recognize his own surroundings. He was lying on a black couch covered by soft warm blue blankets with his head on a pillow, in an unfamiliar basement full of random furniture and possessions he didn't care about scattered around him. It took him several seconds to remember why he was where he was. When he did, he laid back down again trying to let it all sink in as he became overwhelmed with a mixture of different emotions; depression at being rendered homeless, guilt and horror at blaming himself for his orphanage burning down and everyone he knew in it burning with it, and not only that, but relief.

He was relieved, not only that he hadn't made much noise when he woke up, which would've alerted the people having breakfast upstairs to his presence, but he was even feeling relief at his new, depressing situation, and his guilt forced him to stop and consider why. He didn't want to believe he was in any way happy about what had happened. Doing a precocious amount of self-reflection for a child so young, he realized that he was grateful for being free from the orphanage.

That was it right there; he was free. He had at least some degree of freedom now. He could move to anywhere on the island that he wanted to. He couldn't stay there for long, of course, since people will be looking for him, but the fact remained he could finally explore the island outside of his orphanage. Since he was already in trouble, there was no point in refusing to do things that would get him in trouble, like sneaking into people's houses to feed himself.

He could potentially get to explore the house of everyone on the island. That didn't really matter, but it was still more freedom than he had ever had, and he also had the freedom from being mistreated and beaten by the people he had to deal with all his life. He had total independence. While he disliked the idea of not getting an education anymore like the children at the orphanage, being completely in charge of his own life was a fascinating concept.

But that didn't matter, and he was depressed at thinking about it. He wasn't in charge of his own destiny because everyone hated him too much to help him achieve any higher goals, and would be perfectly happy confining him to a life of struggling to survive. No freedom would fix that. His bullies hadn't been gotten rid of, he had simply had his bullies switched from the orphanage people to everyone. And it didn't matter how much he could explore if he wasn't welcome anywhere. He didn't truly have freedom when he still could never get a friend. He might never be able to get what he really wanted all his life, a loved one who would understand and care about him. What was so great about freedom when he was still just as lonely and hated? There was no point in trying to look on the bright side because the bright sides he could find didn't matter.

Being rendered homeless put his life in even more danger. He was going to have to spend his life hopping from house to house stealing food and water from other people's fridges, sleeping in other people's basements, and using other people's bathrooms, all while trying to be as quiet as possible hoping desperately that no one would hear him. Because if they did, he'd have to run for his life, being chased out of the house by the furious inhabitants, who would alert the people of their neighborhood of his presence and force him to travel far through the island to reach another unsuspecting target. Target… just thinking about people who hadn't done him any wrong yet with such a heartless word made Miles ashamed of himself.

He was a criminal. He didn't know the word for it yet, having never watched TV or met anyone like that yet, but the four-year-old fox still knew that if he was the victim of his crimes, he wouldn't be too happy about it himself.

When the people in the house finished their breakfast, they all left it at last, giving Miles the opportunity to rush upstairs and use their bathroom, relieved and happy at not having to be as quiet as possible anymore. He had a house all to himself, and that one fact alone made him happier than he had ever been. In fact, he was struggling to think of a time in life when he was ever smiling for that long. The only real problem he had at that moment was trying to figure out how to make himself breakfast. Walking into the kitchen, he had no idea how breakfast was made. He had to wing it, and the only thing reassuring him was that every other time he had to wing it, he had made intelligent enough assumptions and decisions that it had worked out perfectly for him.

After closing the curtains to prevent any neighbors from seeing him through the kitchen window, he pulled a bowl out of the cabinet above the kitchen counter, threw some eggs into the center of it after pulling the eggshells apart to get the yolk out of them, and disposed of the eggshells in disgust at them making his gloves slimy. He washed his gloves in the kitchen sink, and poured delicious-looking milk from a carton into the bowl and stirred it with a spoon on a whim.

He opened the microwave door pulling the handle towards him, put the bowl in the microwave for 10 seconds, pressing 1, 0 and Start before closing the door. He kept putting it back in the microwave after tasting the warmed-up yolk and egg with a spoon and seeing that it was too cold, finding the process tedious while keeping track of how many times he put it in the microwave in his head so he wouldn't need to repeat the process ever again.

After a minute, he finally made his breakfast warm enough, and sat down with it at the kitchen table because it was considered by people to be the normal thing to do. That, and it was right next to him, and eating while standing up or sitting on the floor wouldn't be as comfortable. He couldn't eat in anyone's bedroom, as that would lead to crumbs and spills alerting people to his presence even faster if he couldn't clean it up. There was no reason he couldn't at least explore the house to see it all for himself. But it soon dawned on him that by doing that, he would be crossing a line that he didn't want to cross.

It was bad enough he was going to start sneaking into people's houses. He didn't feel right about snooping around every house unnecessarily just for the fun of it, when he had no right to and it wasn't vital to his own survival, and would only come off as him acting like he had no guilt over what he was doing. If he knew about the concept of video game consoles and what they looked like, he would've gone looking for them in the house to play them, but even if he did, he felt too guilty at the moment about the fact that he was invading someone's home. Even trying to watch television would feel like he was crossing the line.

After finishing the first actual meal he had ever made for himself, he stared at the wall for a little while having nothing to do, and immediately started depressing himself by reflecting on the various ways people had mistreated him in the past.

" No! My life is different now! I refuse to let this be how I spend most of my time! " Miles said to himself in determination getting up from the table, slamming his fist on it in the first sentence. He was talking to himself to distract himself from the sad fact that there was no one there for him to actually talk to. He had based his unusually precocious speech off the various adults that had worked at the orphanage. This was because he was unable to relate to the other kids who did nothing but bully him, and his youthful innocence had ended up nearly shattered from all the abuse and neglect, so he ended up being more mature than the rest of the orphans and modeling his speech based off the middle-aged adults instead.

That precocious speech of his from a desire to speak intelligently only made him stick out even more, and it didn't help that he had to learn from trial and error what some of the big words he used even meant, which made him look like an idiot in the process. And of course, he couldn't speak like an adult all the time. His actual age slipped out in his speech eventually, especially when he was scared.

Needing to do something to keep his mind off depressing thoughts, he sat on the living room couch and rebelliously decided to watch television, smirking in satisfaction at how he had never been allowed to do that before. He promptly felt like an idiot upon realizing that he had no idea how to turn on the TV in the first place, and had to furiously mash buttons on each of the remote controls in the room before he could finally turn the TV on. After that, he had to study the remote control so he could figure out which buttons based on their appearance would let him change channels, a concept he wouldn't have known about if he hadn't been told about it by the orphans who had taunted him for what he was deprived of.

Having never watched TV before, Miles was very easily impressed and had no standards or preferences. He was just amazed that he was seeing a series of false images on a screen in front of him creating the illusion of an alternate reality on the other side of the screen. If it weren't for his genius IQ, he would've genuinely believed that was the case.

The novelty did wear off after a half hour of watching a kid's cartoon, as he started to actually focus on the dialogue of the show, and the dialogue combined with the wacky sound effects and music felt condescending to him for some reason he couldn't pinpoint. He reflected on why he felt that way, since he was desperate for a solution, and realized that he wanted to watch something that he might actually have a chance of benefiting from, something that might teach him something practical, something educational.

He ended up spending the rest of the day watching the Discovery Channel, heating up a left-over hotdog in the microwave for his lunch as he kept the living room curtains closed. While he liked the feeling of learning from the show, the most special and memorable part of the experience to him was hearing the specific series of sound effects that played in the show at times that didn't sound like speech, a form of organized sound that was pleasant to listen to and evoked emotion in him for some reason. He was hearing music for the very first time, and while he didn't know what it was called, he loved it more than anything. He wished he could make it himself.

His relaxing time at a stranger's home was eventually put to an end when he gasped and jumped at hearing people talking outside as they were walking up to the front door of the house. He turned off the TV and ran back to the basement in a panic, moving there in a yellow blur spinning his tails behind him.

He hid behind some furniture in the basement trembling as he heard the family living in the house entering it talking amongst themselves, a normally innocent sound that to Miles was one of the most terrifying things he had ever heard because it warned of a potential beating. He could clearly hear everyone talking in the living room above him, and to his horror, this ended up revealing to him that he might have gotten himself caught. " Why is it on this channel? " he heard a woman say in confusion. The various people in the house all denied putting it on that channel, and Miles whimpered in anticipation.

It was only when the woman complained, " Maybe it's a glitch, " that he started to calm down, despite not knowing what a glitch was. He heard a man on the floor above him comment, " You sure someone didn't break in? " and to his relief, he heard the woman remark, " Who would break into a house just to watch the Discovery Channel? The kind of person who would do something like that isn't gonna be interested in shows like that. " The man deadpanned, " Well, I've never heard of a TV changing channels by itself, either, but whatever. I'm checking the house later to see if any of our possessions are missing. "

Miles whimpered again at his situation, and wondered in envy if the family was already eating supper by that point, or simply sitting down to enjoy the luxury of watching TV while he was stuck in the basement doing nothing but eavesdropping on their conversations. Unfortunately, what he would hear shortly afterwards would only make him feel worse. He heard the woman upstairs exclaim, " Oh my god! " and from the commotion upstairs, it was revealed to him that the fate of the orphanage had made it on the news, and was being reported for all to see.

" Those poor orphans… " Miles heard a young girl say, and he felt horrible. So many young lives had been taken before their time, by a sudden force of nature they had no control over. Even the orphanage workers were just doing their jobs, ignoring what they did to him. At the same time, he was very frustrated with himself for feeling sorry for those people in the first place. He knew full well what heartless bullies those kids could be, orphaned or not, and he thought to himself, " _You wouldn't be saying that if you knew what jerks they were_ … " clenching his fist. But as soon as he thought that, he felt awful again, and wondered if that proved he really was the monster everyone thought of him as.

" At least that two-tailed freak is gone, " the woman upstairs remarked trying to remain hopeful, and complained about how uncomfortable he made everyone. At hearing that callous remark so suddenly, Miles burst into tears, thinking it wasn't fair, and became unable to focus on anything else. Staying still hiding behind the couch, the four-year-old boy wiped away his tears frantically trying to be as quiet as possible, desperate for night to come and partially agreeing with what he had just heard. He thought, " _Maybe she's right. Maybe I should've died… I'd certainly be a lot happier than I am now… unless what those women said about me ' going to hell ' would end up being true… Is there no escape?_ "

It took a few hours for it to finally reach the point where the family would figure out what had happened. " Honey? Did you go on a diet? " the woman asked upstairs, and the man asked, " Why would you ever think that? " only to get the reply, " We're missing some vegetables from the fridge. " " What? What's missing?! " the man exclaimed, his feet seeming to stomp on the floor above Miles as he stormed into the kitchen suspicious. The woman explained in nervous confusion, " A tomato and a cucumber. " At least she hadn't noticed the disappearance of a few measly celery sticks considering how many there were left, but that was doing little to help Miles in his situation. He wished he could say he had never been so scared in all his life.

" Oh come on, James, you really think someone broke in to steal a bunch of vegetables? Come on. A vegetarian burglar? Ooh, scary! " the woman said skeptically. Unfortunately, the man pointed out, " What about the missing hot dog? " and the woman called out after a stunned silence, " Kids, did you eat the hot-dog in the fridge? " and received a negative answer. That was when she got suspicious.

" Okay, call the police, " the woman said reluctantly. To make matters worse, the worst case scenario began to unfold. Rather than doing that, the man stormed out of the kitchen, threw open the door to the basement, and shouted, " I know you're here somewhere! Where are you?! " putting all of the pieces together.

Realizing he was out of luck, Miles stood up from the floor as slowly and quietly as he could, and waited for the man to start walking further away from the stairs. The stairs were the only exit to the basement, so if he tried to escape right away, he'd end up running right into him. He wanted to put off someone seeing that he was still alive for as long as possible, and that required him to wait for as long as he could before trying to run away. He inched closer and closer to the other side of the couch from where the man was heading towards, and on a complete impulse, having no clear knowledge of when exactly would be too late and doing it early just to be safe, Miles took off running.

The sound of his feet hitting the floor as he started running immediately alerted the man to his presence, but as Miles started spinning his tails behind him and moving faster, the man failed to turn to the right fast enough to see him in time. Unfortunately, Miles' panicked running failed to take into account the stairs, and even though his feet were hovering slightly above the floor, the wind his spinning tails generated still created the same basic effect of running normally, sending him directly forwards, and making him crash into the wooden stairs he was headed towards.

After tripping and landing on his chest sprawled out over the stairs, he ignored the pain and started immediately trying to climb up the stairs in a panic as the man behind him gasped at the two tails in plain sight in front of him. " You're still alive?! " the man exclaimed in a mixture of surprise, confusion, fear, frustration, and a hint of relief that Miles and him refused to acknowledge. " It was struck by lightning! I didn't do it! " Miles blurted out hopelessly, finally succeeding in standing himself up despite his aching pain and rushing up the stairs in a blind panic. He was very lucky he was able to escape the basement without the man hurting him, with the only thing saving him being that the man had stayed still for so long from being so surprised that he was still alive.

The Moebian man's wife had the same surprised reaction at the top of the stairs, and this was just barely enough for Miles to run out of the house in a yellow blur, leaving the place he had once used as a home. Knowing the neighborhood wouldn't be a " safe " target for him for a while, he continued running for a long time through various forests and mountainous fields, and past several buildings, deciding to run as far as he could until he would become tired. When Miles couldn't run anymore, he was far enough away from the crime scene to find the next house he would hide in.

He felt horrible. He wished he wouldn't have to resort to that, being a burglar and snooping around people's homes, and in his frustration, he tried to convince himself that he was doing the right thing. He remembered how unhappy that family was at seeing that he was alive, and was disgusted with them for revealing that they were just as bad if not even worse than the people who tormented him all his life. " _They deserve it_. _All of them do,_ " he thought bitterly as he ran past trees in the woods, and tried his best to hold that thought in his head, repeating it whenever he needed to. It would never completely erase the guilt, but it would do a lot to suppress it. Looking as if he was full of pent-up rage and resentment, he expressed anger to suppress his oncoming sadness, as he had done many times before.

The next time he would try to sneak into a house, he wouldn't be so lucky. With the existence of the telephone combining with everyone on the island knowing each other, every individual on the island was well aware of Miles and what he had started doing within hours, and would immediately want to hurt him on sight.

It was from him hearing what people were saying about him from eavesdropping on them that he learned about how the sheer speed of his running at times wasn't normal. This worked out to his favor, teaching him that he even could move that fast in the first place. He was amazed, and ended up taking every opportunity to move that fast with his tails. He heard that he was spinning his tails far faster than physically possible, and that he shouldn't have been able to spin them that way at all, which made him feel even more abnormal than he already did. Fortunately for him, it was learning about how magical his tails could be that made him more willing to try new things with them. It was partly because of this that he would learn how to fly.

Every day for Miles after his orphanage burned down made him follow the same routine; he would spend all day in a house he broke into until the people in it started searching for him, and then leave it to find another unsuspecting house in the evening, hoping that no one would hurt him that day. He would wake up hiding in a house he had broken into, and carefully listen to the people in the house to determine when exactly they were going to leave, or start searching their house for him, or stumble into him by accident. After determining that, he'd escape the house in a panic, but he'd always have to wait through their conversations first, and sometimes the conversations were centered around those people's boring and vastly happier everyday lives, but every so often they'd comment negatively about him, and make him feel ashamed and guilty in the process.

Normally, Miles would at least get the chance to have breakfast in the house and spend the entire day there watching television, usually with the curtains closed, and he would get to spend at least a couple days there, since he would have to take more than just a few vegetables from a house for people to notice they'd been stolen from.

Eventually, he found a recipe book for the first time, and it was through experimenting with cooking in people's homes that he discovered the wonders of tea, which quickly became his favorite drink. " Wow!... It's like delicious in a cup! " he said in amazement at sipping it for the first time. He had only tried it because it said, " herbal, " on the box and he assumed it was good for him, so discovering how delicious it could be had been a pleasant surprise. While he knew it was healthier to drink water whenever possible to stay hydrated, and so he only drank tea once a day, he loved it enough to make it a daily occurrence at best provided that the house had it.

He would stay in the house's living room until he'd hear the people of the house walking up to it, usually thanks to their chatter amongst themselves, upon which he'd hide in the house for the rest of the day and would have to wait until late at night to get himself supper. Naturally, if there was only one occupant of the house, he was in a lot more danger of being discovered. A house with only one person in it would be one where he wouldn't be able to get away with people assuming that the disappearing food and toilet paper was not the result of a break-in. With other people in the house, he could rely on them to unintentionally cover for him with their mere presence, as everyone would assume the other people in the house were the ones eating what he took from the fridge.

But the scariest part about a single-individual house, was that the inhabitant wouldn't be talking upon walking to their front door giving him warning in advance. They would instead seem to barge into their house and immediately make him give away his location from speeding out of the room and escaping the house from the back door. He ended up taking to only breaking into houses with more than one person living in them, figuring it out through staring into the windows from a hiding place.

After escaping a house, he would move around the island, moving as far away from the previous house as he could until nightfall, trying to hide himself behind trees and bushes whenever he could. By evening, he would approach a residential area hiding himself the best he could, staring through the windows of each house to determine if any people were currently awake and moving around in any of the rooms. If no one was, he would be safe to nerve-rackingly try to enter the house, moving as slowly as possible to make as little noise as he could.

Unfortunately, as word spread of the daily instances of breaking-and-entering on the island, the neighborhoods of the village quickly started locking their doors, making it more difficult to enter their homes than before. Occasionally Miles would get lucky and he'd find a key under the welcome mat, but the majority of the time, that wouldn't happen, because the owner of the house kept the key with them as they went to work and brought it with them inside when they were done. As a result, Miles had to resort to entering homes through the windows, which were high above the ground with the exception of the windows of the basement. By that point in his life, he had been homeless for five days, and was unaware that he could fly.

By the time the weekend came, everyone on the island had gotten into the habit of making sure all of their windows were locked from the outside, trapping Miles outside until he would find a solution, forcing him to wander the island wondering what to do next. After reaching the park, he happily rushed to a drinking fountain and started drinking from it as fast as possible, ignoring the disapproving people who witnessed him quench his thirst. One of them commented, " Never drinking from _that_ fountain again. "

Staying at the fountain for that long left him vulnerable, and before he could completely finish with it, he was painfully smacked into the fountain from behind, hearing a teenager shout, " Take that, ' Tails! ' " Miles grimaced and held his forehead, which was bruised from the impact, and tried to run away to avoid more injuries to himself. But before he could, he was punched and then kicked in the back, which sent him towards the fountain falling to the ground beside it in great pain.

Everyone in the park started cheering through his grueling experience as Miles struggled to get up being stomped on by a bully, and he was frustrated and miserable with the injustice of the situation as it started to rain heavily above him. After frantically trying to think of a way to protect himself, he smacked the bully behind him with his tails as hard as he could, sending him falling backwards with a grunt and giving Miles precious time to get himself to stand up. The cheering stopped immediately and was replaced by a shocked and disapproving silence.

Remembering the other beatings that he had suffered at the hands of various bullies, Miles made sure to move his tails so that they were in front of him as he stood up and started running, trying to make sure they wouldn't be grabbed and yanked from behind again because that only led to the worst of beatings. He started spinning his tails behind him to get a boost as soon as he could, and by the time the teenager with a dark jacket had finished standing up, he had left the park in a yellow blur. Unfortunately, running through a forest full of trees he had to dodge at high speed did nothing good for his frazzled nerves, and the more he just barely avoided a tree, the more panicked he became.

After half a minute of rushing through the woods, the ground ran out from beneath him, and with his tails only propelling him forwards while barely defying gravity for him, he fell forwards screaming towards the trees far below him, falling off a cliff at a speed so fast that the wind was roaring past him.

Panicking, Miles started spinning his tails above him in desperation, which ended up saving his life. He learned to spin his tails above him like a helicopter and keep himself in the air for as long as he needed to. On the one hand, it made the people of the island see him as even more of a freak and become a lot more willing to call him an outright demon, knowing that he was doing something supernatural. But on the other hand, flying allowed him to travel the island a lot more conveniently, and he didn't have to worry about flying during a storm because no one looks up when it's raining.

The best part was that being able to fly allowed him to enter any house he needed to by flying into the chimney, although that came with its own problems. Entering through the chimney often left him completely covered in soot, which he desperately wanted to clean off as soon as he entered the house, but trying to do so always made a lot of noise, which made him a nervous wreck in an occupied house no matter how late at night it was. Whether he tried the shower or a regular bath, it always made noise, and so would the coughing that resulted from him breathing soot in, and that was the last thing he needed when sneaking into a house.

He had to resort to the most rudimentary, safe way to clean himself of the soot; wetting a washcloth with a dripping faucet from the sink and scrubbing himself with it, waiting until the people in the house were off at work or school before actually giving himself a bath. This became a daily occurrence for him, and he hated the feeling of soot on his fur, especially when soot ended up covering cuts beneath it. It drove home like nothing else that he was homeless, without a penny to his name.

Keeping himself hidden in a person's house was harder than he thought it would be. He learned that he needed to make a lot more of an effort to try to keep everything the way it was when the people in the house left for the day, or he would eventually be found out. Dirty dishes ended up becoming one of the biggest clues that tipped off people to start silently searching the house with a weapon. He could get away with it if there were multiple different people living in the house at once, as he could rely on everyone to just assume someone else had the meal that dirtied the dish, or that someone else warmed up the leftovers in the fridge.

But sometimes the increasingly paranoid island dwellers would jump to conclusions and blame him for any missing leftovers or suspiciously dirty dishes. They blamed him for anything they could, just like they always did. " Honey, who had scrambled eggs for breakfast today? " he heard a woman asking her husband as he hid in their pantry, only a month after his orphanage burned to the ground. There was an eerie silence that dragged on for an unbearable amount of time as he heard footsteps all around the house, and the silence was finally broken with the door to the pantry being flung open by a furious-looking fox Moebian.

" Caught you! " he shouted, and smirked refusing to move from his place blocking the only way out of the room. Miles gasped, trembling uncontrollably as he heard the sound of everyone else in the house rushing to the pantry eagerly talking about what they planned to do to him. His only chance was to take the risk, spin his tails behind himself to burst forwards from a gale force wind propelling him ahead, moving straight towards the menacing man in front of the door, and hope against hope that crashing into him at such speed wouldn't cause any serious injuries or take up too much time for his escape. Too panicked to think straight, he carried out his plan with no regard for the safety of the person in front of him, and knocked him over from running into him. As he started falling over with the screaming man, his plan immediately backfired, because he was still holding the weapon.

" Ow! " Miles screamed in pain, and immediately felt like an idiot for blurting that out and alerting everyone to where he was. The loud clanking sound of a frying pan smacking his back would go on to haunt him for years to come as he was held to his abuser's chest by his other arm. " Take this, freak! You think you can steal our food and get away with it?! Well, you've got another thing coming! " the man said vengefully, smacking him with the frying pan repeatedly, and Miles grimaced trying to cope with the pain for a few seconds before taking desperate measures to protect himself.

The man suddenly yelped in pain at Miles attacking him in self-defense, summoning all of his pent-up anger at the world as he hit him in the face, demanding, " Let me go! " Deep down, he felt horrible for what he had been driven to, attacking a random stranger like some kind of wild animal, but the aching stinging bruises all over his back were more than reason enough for him to defend himself.

Unfortunately, the rest of the people in the house soon arrived at the scene with a vengeance. While he was let go and was able to roll onto the carpet, lying on his back made him more vulnerable than he had been before, and he was greeted with a flurry of punches from the teenaged son of the man and his wife.

Desperate and wondering if he was going to die, Miles started defending himself with his tails, whipping them around him as fast as he could, smacking the people around him at full force, and because his tails were so wide, belonging to a fox and all, they were unable to grab them and hold them still in the commotion as they moved in a yellow blur. He tried to look angry and menacing in spite of how much pain he felt, and in spite of the voice in the back of his mind telling him to be ashamed.

His tails kept moving along the carpet over and over again brushing against it as they attacked the people in front of him, and he started to hear a crackling sound after a while that seemed to come from the carpet itself, until before he knew it, all of his tormenters screamed at some golden electric sparks coming from his tails. His tails had been building up static electricity from the carpet, and the sheer amount of it that they could store ended up saving his life.

" Remove the carpet! Call the police! " the woman exclaimed backing away, her hair standing on end from being shocked with everyone else. Miles finally started getting back on his feet, noticing at last that his tails were sparking with golden electricity as everyone in the house ran away from him in fear. The amazed smile on his face from childlike curiosity quickly disappeared at the woman shouting, " Monster! " as she ran away, and he looked horrified with himself and wished that the electricity would disappear. Fortunately for him, it did, but it didn't get rid of the fear in him that people were right about him.

Forcing himself to run out of the house as he thought about it instead of standing still, he remembered how the people in his orphanage blamed him for any stormy weather they had, and used it as an excuse to give him a beating. They thought there was something supernatural about him, and so far, he had done nothing but prove them right; he could move at blisteringly fast speeds, he could fly, and now he could shock people if he moved his tails along a carpet. All of those were supernatural abilities. Maybe he was a demon.

Unfortunately, the fact that one of his victims said to remove the carpet made him worry that word would spread of this and soon there would be no more carpets left in the island, so that ability of his wouldn't do him any good, and he felt wrong enough about attacking people like a bully without shocking them at that. He didn't know what shocking even was until he saw it happen. He didn't know how it felt or what it was called. All he knew was that it made people's hair stand on end as they screamed in pain, and it was all his fault, just like his orphanage burning down. He had been chased out of a house covered in aching bruises and bumps, and he was determined to not let that happen to him again.

The next day, in the next house, he sighed unhappily making his breakfast because he knew that he had no choice but to put it on a plate or bowl. With the eggs and milk in front of him on the kitchen counter, he looked over at all the bowls and plates in the sink, and got an idea. He could tell from the egg residue on them that they had already been used for breakfast that day. Miles thought to himself with a serious expression, " _I don't really feel like it's healthy to reuse a plate someone else ate off of… But if that plate was cleaned… Hmm, wait a minute… if I clean my plate after I use it… That's it!_ "

From that day on, Miles had a specific plan for dirty dishes; he would try to clean them in the bathroom sink with the water from the tap scrubbing them with a hard sponge, the kind that was meant for removing minor stains. If he couldn't clean it completely and pass it off as a clean dish, he would hide it below the other plates hoping that he had at least cleaned it enough to avoid suspicion. That decision did a lot to stall off him being caught, and would be followed by another one; he would try his best to refrain from eating leftovers in the fridge because those meals were the most likely to get him caught from eating, and he would try to stick to eating food that didn't require dishes whenever possible. Anything nutritious that he could eat with his hands was a good pick, and that usually that consisted of fruits and vegetables.

He wasn't satisfied with only eating food that way, though, especially considering his increasingly growing interest in learning how to cook. Not happy with just using a microwave, as the months went by, Miles got into the habit of looking for a recipe book every lunch and trying to make any recipe he could find the ingredients for. He found the process of cooking easy and satisfying, easy because he just followed instructions, and satisfying because he got to look at his finished meal and know that he made that at such a young age.

Of course, he didn't spend all of every day cooking. The other major thing that generally got him caught was that the people of the house would know he had changed the channel on their TV. As a result, Miles started keeping track of what channel the TV started out on before switching it to the Discovery Channel. All of that combined so that he ended up extending the amount of time he was able to hide in people's houses by several days at a time.

Unfortunately, that still didn't stop him from getting caught. Eventually, the people of the island started pulling a trick on him where they would leave their house ten minutes early, wait a little while and then barge back into their house, catching him out of his hiding place. It became an island tradition, where everyone would do that on a daily basis just in case he was in their house waiting for them to leave. Fortunately, after being tricked a few times, he became wise to what was going on, realizing that it was everyone on the island who was in on the trick and not just a few people. But the beatings from when he was tricked left him with memories he would never forget.

The weekend ended up becoming Miles' least favorite time of the week as he lived without a home; it was the one time of the week where nearly everyone on the island stayed home for the entire day, preventing him from going to the kitchen in the process. He was forced to stay in his hiding place for the entire day only leaving it late at night, staying up all night in the process. Holidays gave him the exact same problem, but worse, as instead of getting to enjoy Christmas or his birthday or whatnot with a loved one, he was stuck hiding in the basement or attic trying to sleep all day until nightfall. Because of that, he hated weekends and he hated holidays the most of all, and made sure to check the calendar every day so that he'd know when such a day was coming up. Naturally, this meant he didn't appreciate days like Christmas, not because of anything inherently wrong with them, but out of his envy and misery that he couldn't enjoy them like everyone else did.

That wasn't to say he went completely without food just because he couldn't cook for the day; his meals were spent with him eating whatever healthy food he could eat without cooking, like carrots and celery sticks. He would bring everything he needed to eat for the weekend down to his hiding spot, usually the basement, and would keep them there. Naturally, he learned to hate the fact that some food really did need to be in the fridge and would start to rot from staying out of it for two days, especially since it forced him to leave his hiding place to get rid of the stenchful result.

Being able to fly and move incredibly fast didn't always prevent him from getting hurt. Someone could sneak up behind him to attack him, he could be attacked by someone he didn't know was near him, or in the worst-case scenario, he'd be approached when he was most vulnerable, when he was either asleep or sitting down. Being attacked when he was that vulnerable was a problem he'd never be able to overcome. He learned to recognize when he felt like he was being watched, or more accurately, when he sensed the presence of the electromagnetic field of a person nearby, and this let him avoid surprise attacks more often. But he was helpless when he was asleep.

There were four inhabited corners of the village that he would alternate between, and unfortunately, as people began to grow wise to his planned routes, he would have to deal with the next corner he was headed for being prepared ahead of time.

He lived on a quiet island that didn't really experience any serious crime aside from the minor mischief a gang of teenagers engaged in, so nearly every day was a slow work day for the police force. As a result, policemen on the night shift were happy to agree to guard people's homes from him, staring up at the dark rainy sky with binoculars ready to warn their partners to shoot him down. Since they were inside their vehicles, they were able to look up at the sky no matter how rainy it was and spot him.

There were only so many police officers on the night shift on the island, so there would always be one house-filled corner that was safer than the others, because only so many could keep track of the sky all night. Miles ended up having to spend more and more time on the ground in the evening searching for safe places to fly, deciding to switch from flying to the nearest next residential area to randomizing which one he'd go to next, which resulted in every single area of the village being wary of him every night.

The police were expecting him to be flying, and since everyone kept their windows and doors locked because of him, he had no choice but to fly because he needed to enter through the chimney. If a neighborhood had a police car in it at night, chances are that police were searching the sky for him and would spot him by the time he'd have noticed them, and trying to fly away would only make the car start driving after him, with the partner of the driver shooting for him all the while. Miles ended up having to switch to simply running a lot of the time because flying all the time was too dangerous.

Unfortunately, he wouldn't always be able to do that. The main part of him people aimed for when attacking him was his tails, and with even one tail injured, he was rendered unable to run as fast as he needed to, and unable to fly, until it healed. He could handle bruises and cuts to them, but if even one of his tails was stomped on or smacked too hard, he would end up incapable of flying and moving quickly because spinning the injured tails would be unbearably painful for him, and being unable to fly meant staying outside in the woods until he recovered.

With his tails injured, he had no warm dry place to stay when it was raining and thundering out, which it almost always was, so he had to either hide in a cave if he found one, or " suck it up " and sleep in a forest full of trees that could be struck by lightning that would cause a forest fire in his sleep for all he knew. Without being in a house, there was no healthy drinkable water for him – he learned the hard way that water from a lake, ocean or river did not count – and as for food, he had very few, unappealing choices.

He could either take his chances eating berries that might make him sick, search for and then climb apple and orange trees and take the risk of trying to get some to eat when the branches could break beneath his feet. Or he had the option of hunting animals, somehow removing their fur and cooking them to eat, an option he was repulsed by on the rare occasion he thought about it. Hiding in the woods, he had witnessed animals hunting each other and succeeding multiple times, and the sight of it only brought back horrible memories of when he had been cut in the same areas of his body.

Even if he could prepare the animal just right, he refused to actually carry the act out. " I may be a ' thief, ' but I still have standards, " he mumbled to himself harvesting apples after seeing a beer feast on a deer from up in an apple tree. He ate as many of them as he could possibly stomach, getting into the habit of gorging himself in such desperate situations when he found any food at all. Whenever he found a food source, he would stay there until he ran out of it, with nothing to do all day but depress himself with his own memories.

Of course, he had to run away from wild animals several times in the woods, and when his tails were too injured to let him move at maximum speed, he had to exert as much effort as he could while running on foot to successfully evade them. He ended up teaching himself to zig zag to throw off pursuers. There were several animals he learned to fear; the bats that liked infesting the caves he tended to hide in, the bees that would teach him to jump at their ominous buzzing, and the guard dogs that the people of the village would start adopting in droves to protect their homes from him. Just the sound of their barking terrified him, and after being bitten in the arm by one, he would learn to fear them more than any other animal.

The people of the island knew full well that any time he was rendered unable to fly, he was stuck in the worst possible situation, hiding in the woods while he was vulnerable with little access to food and no clean water to drink. After two days, he wouldn't be able to stand the thirst anymore. While he normally went to the park to drink from the fountain at night, there was one time when he was too far from it in the middle of the day, and resorted to running into a store and stealing water bottles for himself in desperation. He would've loved to have been able to pay for the water, but he didn't have a penny to his name. He had no way of earning money when no one would give him any, and as he would learn from a particularly cruel hot dog salesman, no one would let him be their customer anyways. If anything, standing still in front of someone trying to pay them for that long only made him a target for a beating.

Fortunately, the beatings would never be enough to kill him. For some reason people blamed solely on him, lightning would strike near him as if to scare off his bullies if any of them were about to do something that would kill him, like one particularly traumatizing memory where he was being held up and strangled for over thirty seconds in a row. He didn't like the idea of anyone being struck by lightning and him being blamed for it, but a few times, it ended up being necessary for him to stay alive, especially when he had been rendered unable to fly or move fast enough to protect himself. Being unable to fly temporarily practically crippled him, so he didn't want to think about what would become of him if anyone injured one of his legs.

Sadly, he would have the misfortune of finding out. That was where his kidnappers came in; three different individuals each time who rather than going through the trouble of trying to kill him, would punish him for his perceived wrongs by using him as a method of stress relief, a punching bag who would have to deal with whatever insults the person could throw at him. Those experiences were the closest he ever got to have to being allowed to stay in the hospital, giving him a warm place to stay with a steady supply of food and water, and a person willing to provide him with what he needed as he was recovering from his injuries.

He always spent his time recovering tied to the toilet of a bathroom in the dark with nothing to do but make himself miserable with his own memories. The closest he got to excitement was when he was being tortured, usually with horrible noises like that of a fork scratching on a plate while his tormenter had earplugs and a smirk.

He would've loved someone trying to keep him alive for once if only he was treated with more respect, instead of tormented and insulted on the three times per day he was interacted with. But even offering to do the person's chores for them after he was able to walk again didn't stop them from mistreating him, and he was only able to escape was when the police searching the island for him finally found him, and he had to escape from them immediately afterwards.

He struggled to survive for almost 2 years afterwards on an island where everyone demonized him and wanted him dead, blaming him for everything. Going from an innocent child naively trying to get people to sympathize with him to a frightened one cynically fearing and hating all people, Miles ended up losing most of his motivation to care about people and what the right thing to do even was.

While he had a relatively easy time for the first couple of months without a home, being able to spend most of every day hiding in someone's house when they were at work, eventually it started becoming harder and harder for him to get away with that practice. The islanders started hiring people to guard their homes while they were at work, and some of the people hired for the job were the teenaged thugs that would become his worst enemies. With the exception of the police, the young criminals of the island were the main people trying to hunt Miles down, while the rest of the islanders were content to just live their lives and only attack him if they caught him in their homes.

If that wasn't bad enough, the people of the island started making it impossible for him to sneak in through the chimney, removing their chimneys entirely to prevent him from entering. The process was expensive and slightly time-consuming, and that was the only thing keeping everyone on the island from all getting rid of their chimneys at once.

Without an easy way to access people's homes in the dark of night, Miles was forced to try to learn how to lock-pick. Simply breaking a window wouldn't work because the noise of the glass shattering would alert people to his presence, giving him at worst seconds to leave and at best a day before they found the broken window. That was assuming he even could break the window at all, as the glass of windows was surprisingly hard to completely break. He was more likely to have a thrown rock ricochet off it back at him. He couldn't just stay outside all the time, especially when the freezing winds of winter started occurring.

Eventually, he ended up listening into the conversations of the gang of teenaged bullies he feared so much, stalking and spying on them until he finally found out what he needed to know. Even after that, he was reluctant to try it at every opportunity because he could only lock-pick the front door of a house, which was exposed to the entire neighborhood; spending all that time lock-picking a door with his back turned made him very paranoid and agitated, as at any moment, a patrolling police car of the neighborhood watch could drive by and catch him.

Because of how risky and inconvenient breaking into houses had become, Miles ended up spending more and more of his time hiding in the woods, struggling to get his next meal. He once resorted to trying to eat from a trash can – which made him sick – and accepted a sandwich from a man at the park pretending to pity him – which gave him food poisoning for a while. He cleaned himself in rivers instead of showering in a house because nearly every house had at least one person guarding it all day, ready to barge into the room he was in with any weapon they could get their hands on the minute they heard him in it.

The houses that weren't like that were guarded by dogs who had been trained to attack him, and he didn't feel right about simply getting rid of them when that'd only prove people right about him. He had to steal warm clothes for himself to survive the freezing rains of winter, feeling horrible about snooping around in every house's closet trying to look for clothes in his size.

With the roofs of all the buildings having their chimneys removed and everyone conspiring against him, Miles ended up having to spend most of his time outside, and could barely spend a minute in most of the buildings without someone catching him in it and chasing him out. That was how his life had ended up getting as desperate as it did when Scourge saved his life.


End file.
